Catherine Arnold

Catherine Arnold is a doctoral candidate in early modern history at Yale University, where she is currently completing her dissertation with the support of a Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship in Religion and Ethics. Her project examines Britain’s diplomacy to protect refugees and prisoners from across Europe during the first half of the eighteenth century. By investigating British diplomacy on behalf of Protestants in France and Savoy, Catholics in France, and Jews in Portugal and Bohemia, she traces how British politicians came to argue that the sentiment of humanity – specifically, the need to prevent innocent people, whatever their religion, from being unjustly punished by their governments – trumped state sovereignty and justified intervening in other states’ domestic affairs.